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Sunday, 23 February 2014

Interview Part 1: PJ Holden on Murderdrome and Digital Comics

The original illustrated version of this interview appeared in Infinity #0, released July 2012. You can get the whole magazine free on SEQUENTIAL for iPad.

PART ONE:CNN IS CALLING FOR YOU…

Paul (’PJ’) Holden woke up on a sunny morning in his native Belfast to find himself the centre of worldwide media attention. It was 2009 and the established comic-strip artist (whose work is currently appearing in 2000 AD and Strip Magazine) had been dabbling in a little thing called digital comics…

Russell Willis

It’s May 2009, you’re sitting at your drawing board in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and CNN and the world is talking about you… How did this all come about?

PJ Holden

It all happened within about a two-week period. I was talking to a software developer at a friend’s wedding and told him I wanted to do something with comics because I thought the iPhone would be a spectacular device for comics. This was because in the UK, especially, we have a tradition of different physical-sized comics which America doesn’t really have. I was thinking really of Commando comics, which is a kind of digest-sized comic where you get two panels per page. That’s it. There’s not room for much within that. I kind of reasoned that, well, if you treat each screen of the iPhone as its own page, you could have a comic. It ticks all the boxes in Scott McCloud’s definition of what a comic is. It’s sequential images juxtaposed against each other to tell a story.

The software developer from the wedding, Phil Orr, turned out to be an iPhone programmer at a time when there were very few iPhone programmers. He had wanted to do a children’s storybook. We sat down and I thrashed out a couple of ideas and we developed the software and I drew the comic.

It was a two-page comic – a proof of concept more than anything else. I had said to him and I said to a bunch of other people, look, we could do market research here. We could go and spend a fortune trying to figure out if this is the sort of thing that would sell or we could actually just do it and put it up there and see if it sells. I kind of reasoned that one would cost as much as the other. Oddly it cost less to actually just do it and put it out there than it would have cost for us the invest time and the effort to do the market research.

So it seemed like the most sensible thing to do was just to do it, and do a very, very simple proof of concept to see if this would work. And so we submitted Murderdrome. We sent it to Apple’s App Store and the great wait began…

Russell Willis

I understand that it was written by Al Ewing, is that right?

PJ Holden

That’s right, and the thing with Murderdrome was it was conceived as software and comic at almost exactly the same time. Unlike a lot of stuff that’s out there, Murderdrome the comic was drawn specifically for the iPhone. A lot of stuff that we did on it was only possible because we were doing it at the same time as developing the software.

One of the things that we did was this sort of multiple layers of having pencils, inks, and colours and so on, and to allow for multiple languages. You could have had multiple languages in the same comic with the same artwork because of how we built the software. At that time I think there were about five or six comics on the App Store. All of those were repurposed content, so what we were doing was a completely new thing. So we submitted this to Apple and the friend who had gone off to get married went on honeymoon. By the time he came back from honeymoon, we had just got word from Apple that they were rejecting the app.

Russell Willis

On what grounds?

PJ Holden

Essentially they were rejecting it because the content was too violent. And it was quite violent. But it was a very silly comic. It was essentially an exaggerated spoof of all the boys’ comics from the 70s that featured futuristic sports where people have to die in order to play. The Mean Arena in 2000 AD is a good example of it. There would be street battles and people would be shot with lasers and all sorts of craziness. Murderdrome was sort of an exaggeration of that. In order to score a goal in Murderdrome, you had to decapitate an opposing player and use their head as a ball. I think when you hear the idea about how to score a goal it’s instantly funny. It’s so over the top.

Russell Willis

Did Apple have their rating system sorted out? Because when you submit an app now you need to define how offensive it might be.

PJ Holden

I did a lot of interviews at the time and one of the things I said was that ‘if Apple introduced a proper rating system…’ because Apple had a rating system for games, but at that point had never considered or didn’t appear to have considered the idea that people would be trying to sell content.

As far as Apple was concerned, people were going to sell software, and so videogames needed a rating because that’s the sort of software that you need to have a rating on but nothing else would need it – you wouldn’t need a rating, for example, on an application that told you about astronomy or how to do your accounts. So Apple had a rating system but if you weren’t a videogame you had to have a PG rating, the thinking went. I also think that, frankly, if Apple’s American sensibilities were closer to British sensibilities, there’s a good chance they would have let us through: it was just a stupid and ridiculous spoof.

Russell Willis

Do you think they were also concerned because it was a comic, and ‘comics are for kids’ and therefore it would mislead kids into buying material that wasn’t suitable?

PJ Holden

Yeah, but I find that with Apple that the more you try to scrutinise them the more inscrutable they are.

Russell Willis

(Laughter) Very true.

PJ Holden

We got a two-line response saying if you simply tone down the content then you can resubmit, which looked like a form letter to me… The premise of it is that you decapitate a player to score a goal… I talked to friends about it afterwards and said, look – the thing is if you tone it down what you do is you actually make it worse, because by toning it down you remove the fact that it is really satire. Once you get rid of, say, the outrageous method of scoring a goal and replace it with something more realistic it just becomes utterly violent.

Russell Willis

Now it’s just nasty. Yeah.

PJ Holden

It just becomes nasty. That’s the thing. It’s like any joke, really. The more exaggerated that is, the funnier it becomes; and the less exaggerated it is, the more it becomes a statement rather than a joke. I enjoyed the fact that it was ridiculous and over the top and just very silly. There is a sequence in it where one character goes, ‘I killed them with my bare hands’, and the camera pulls up and you’re looking down at the guy shaking his fists. It only works because it’s deliberately over the top. It’s like saying to Monty Python about the Holy Grail: you can’t exaggerate anything. It has to be about a search for the Holy Grail, and then what have you got left?

Russell Willis

So you refused to tone it down and pleaded your case?

PJ Holden

Yeah, so we waited and waited and waited and Apple took a while but they eventually rejected it again.

Matt Johnston, the guy whose honeymoon it was, was always going to be the third partner along with myself and Phil. Matt had a good business head and had started up a couple of businesses and so we kind of sat down and we went, Matt, while you’ve been away we did this; and we sent it to Apple and they rejected it. Do you want to send out a press release? He went, yeah sure, I’ll send out a press release. I can’t emphasise enough how much things were done on a whim. Let’s do this, let’s try this. What about this? There was no plan in place.

So Matt went, yeah, I will send out a press release. I sent an email to Rich Johnston at the Bleeding Cool website. At the time, these rejections were making news. Apple had just rejected an app that was a photograph of a knife and when you made a stabbing motion with the phone, it would make the sound from Psycho… it was a joke app… it was clearly over the top; Apple rejected it. I am not quite sure on what grounds, but there was a big stink in the press. We’re talking the early days of apps. These were the first kind of apps that were coming out. Apple were rejecting one thing after another. Each of these things that was being rejected was getting a bit of press. At that point, Apple were rejecting things, and people were going, oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech. With the Murderdrome app I felt that because Apple had rejected it, that in itself was enough for a little bit of coverage. Because Apple had rejected it on the grounds of content there was also a freedom of speech issue. You can squint at it and say it’s a freedom of speech issue.

I thought those two things would be enough to get a little bit of coverage and I thought that would do us no harm. We sent this stuff out… and it got phenomenal coverage. It got so much coverage that I can’t even begin to look at it without thinking: ‘Good grief!’ It was like – what was it like? I put a pebble in the water and it caused a tsunami. The reaction was so much bigger than the actual action and we were all reeling, the three of us were reeling.

At the time, I was working for a charity doing computer work. I had been there about nine years. I couldn’t justify leaving the job because it was so well paid. It was so easy. It was only three days a week and I could draw comics the rest of the time. There was just no way I could turn around and say I want to leave this brilliantly paid job that’s part-time. A job that let me spend so much time at home. I couldn’t say I wanted to leave that job for a badly paid job; a job that would mean I would have to work every single hour. Any rational person would look at it and say that I would be mad to drop such a great job… But we were getting international coverage… The story was all over the blogosphere and so on.

Russell Willis

The press were featuring images from the comics in their coverage?

PJ Holden

Yes, but it was just a two-page comic – I put a YouTube video on it out at the same time to show the app more, because no one had seen it. And it was hard to explain in words what the app was about. But when you saw the app and how it was used, it looked magical because again, this is pre-iPad, and this is sort of the early day of apps.

One of the things was the – I can explain it to you by saying ‘you swipe your finger down and the inks are replaced by pencils’, but what happened was when you swiped your finger down there was a magical sort of metamorphosis where the inks were replaced by pencils and the inks slowly disappeared over the lead pencils. If you are into art, into comic art, then that in itself is like this beautiful magical thing.

I did a silent video of me demonstrating the application. I put it on YouTube and we put the press release out at the same time. Within a week we had 40,000 views on YouTube. Now, if you sold 40,000 copies of a comic that would be a phenomenal sale. 40,000 views in a week on YouTube was like, oh, my!

The other thing we did – because Apple had rejected the app was… Well, they were opening an Apple Store in Belfast and I thought it’d be hilariously funny to print up some T-shirts with our logo on it from the game, from Murderdrome. It was like a skull and cross and two bones which was the tattoo from a character in it and it became part of the logo.

I thought, what we’ll do is go down to the Apple Store that’s opening and we’ll hand these T-shirts out whilst people are queueing. I reasoned that if we only do up five or six T-shirts and give them to the people in the front of the queue, what’s going to happen is that the BBC will be there to film the fact that there’s a queue there, but they’ll also be interested in the first few people going in. They wouldn’t film the tail end of it or the middle of it, they’ll only film the first few. That’s exactly what happened. If you ever see the video, it looks like every person in the queue has a Murderdrome T-shirt.

Then they interviewed one of the guys there, the BBC did an interview with him. He was wearing the T-shirt as well. It seemed like this sort of – it was like we were going through this period where everything we decided to do on a whim was working out in the best possible way.

It was strange. It was easily the strangest experience of my life. We did a couple of kids’ comics which instead of sort of using the PR from Murderdrome we just kind of went, no, we don’t want to associate with that because people will think of blood and death and these are kids’ comics so we don’t want to do that, which was maybe in hindsight a bit daft. We did those and I showed the apps off at a couple of comic conventions and we ended up fielding calls from senior editors at DC Comics, senior people at Marvel. Then we got an email out of the blue from Universal Studios in the States asking if we wanted to look at developing our app for their comics, for the TV series Heroes. We had a couple of conference calls with those guys and in the end that’s what we did. It was at that point that I chucked my job in.

I should say this was all within maybe two weeks of the app being rejected.

Russell Willis

That was a powerful press release!

PJ Holden

If you just happen to have the magic words in it – and at that time all eyes were on Apple, all eyes were on things being banned. Those were the things that made – I think it got picked up at one place, then another, then another, then another because it was a hot issue for a little while. The mistake I made, with hindsight, is clear – the mistake I made was thinking that those 40,000 views on YouTube meant something. What they really meant was that we were this week’s cat playing the piano. That’s all we were. But I thought this was it, this is it. Guys, we’ve reinvented comics for the iPhone. We have completely destroyed Diamond Distribution and print is dead. And I am going through a bit of a mad period because publicity about what we had done was everywhere.

Russell Willis

You were imagining that every person that viewed the YouTube video would buy an app…

PJ Holden

I just assumed. 40,000 views, that translates to – even for a pessimist – that translates to at least 30,000 people or 30,000 purchases, which is good money in comics. No matter what way you cut it… which of course was nonsense!

The important thing about the video was that it was seen by a couple of people at senior positions in NBC and DC and a few other places, that were then capable of turning around and saying, look, can we have a chat with you.

Russell Willis

And this was before Comixology, before Graphicly, before any of these major digital comics distributors had really got off the ground.

PJ Holden

I think the guy at iVerse had come to the same conclusion as me which was that digital comics were going to be big. It was the press coverage of Murderdrome that attracted all the attention to digital comics and I knew iVerse had seen it, and the head of iVerse then had to make a move which sort of prompted him to push a little bit faster I think. That was iVerse; Comixology ultimately came in and they realised that it wasn’t really about the technology, it was all about what publishers you established relationships with. It was about that. It was about whether you can get Marvel on board, whether you can get DC on board. Everything else is almost a secondary consideration.

In a space of two weeks we ended up with a big contract to write an application for Universal to do comics with them – and I left my job. I left the job thinking, I am going to go off now and do comics and I’m going to do digital comics. This is going to be awesome.

Russell Willis

What happened to the Heroes comic? Did that get published?

PJ Holden

Weirdly they limited it so it would only be on sale in the US. What we found was the bigger the company we were dealing with, the more people had to have their fingers in it. The more people that had their fingers in it, the less people wanted to do it. The NBC guy who really wanted to push this was their head of mobile application development. The people who really didn’t want to do it were the people who actually did the comics. One was pulling and the other one was pushing and in the end the comic was released – in a form nowhere near what we wanted to do with it. And it took longer because they kept changing their minds about what they wanted. It was only available in America. I can’t even download the thing to look at.

It was only me and one other guy involved in the programming of it. When I left everything was working but the moment Apple changed their devices they would have required him to update things and he would have had to do more development. Once I left to focus on drawing comics I – I wouldn’t say I cut ties, but I was moving forwards rather than backwards.

Russell Willis

The company name was Infurious, right? I think there is a sort of remnant of that website still around on there.

PJ Holden

We had enormous plans. One of the plans that we had was – in a way I am sorry it never really came about – was that we had planned that there’d be a comic reader and backend website that allowed anyone to submit comics, and the backend was going to allow you to submit material to it and press a button and it would be available on the comic reader.

I kind of came up with – we were going to call it Infurious Republic to push the idea that it’s for anyone. Anyone could submit their comics. It’s taken a while but Graphicly I think are doing the same sort of thing. We talked about that two or three years ago or whenever it was because I felt that the way to do it was to give people access, upload the stuff, possibly charging $10 or something for a joining fee and maybe $10 for uploading the thing because it was one of those things – in a gold rush the people making money are the people who sell picks – that kind of thing.

Russell Willis

As you had the contract with Universal for the Heroes comic, I assume you were planning to do something along those lines. What happened?

PJ Holden

I think we were just a little too early and at the same time all this stuff had swept over me, and I had found myself going from a part-time computer job to a full-time computer job and had even less time to draw. It didn’t quite work out the way that I had imagined. My younger son had just been born and then tragically my wife’s brother committed suicide and that completely – it pulled everything from under my family and it made me sort of re-evaluate exactly what was going on. I kind of thought: I really want to draw. All I want to do is draw.

Because of my wife Annette’s brother I kind of – I’ve lost some family of mine as well years and years ago, and every so often you lose a close family member and you think, what am I doing? Am I really doing something that I – if this is the last thing I do, will I be happy?

I realised I didn’t want to reinvent comics distribution on a digital platform. What I wanted to do was draw comics.

In Part Two PJ discusses the state of digital comics and how he threw away a chance to be at the centre of a booming business in order to follow his passion: drawing comics.The second part of this interview will be available here shortly, or you can read it in Infinity #0 available on SEQUENTIAL.